Tag: Articles of Confederation

Scotus: The Third Political Branch. When Alexander Hamilton penned the 85th Federalist, Concluding Remarks, in August 1788, eleven states had ratified the Constitution. While there was no practical need to… Read more »

Subtitle: Swamp-Creatures. Meeting in Convention, delegates once again considered the Fourth Resolution, which dealt with senatorial elections, term length, age qualification, salary, and eligibility to additional offices. The answers to… Read more »

Recall from Part I, the legal sovereign has unlimited, absolute, and supreme law-making power. The supreme law in England, its constitution, is whatever the King-in-Parliament determines it to be. Statutory… Read more »

Recall from the Introduction to this series, James Madison’ seemingly contradictory stances in The Federalist No. 40. Is the Constitution an amended version of the Articles of Confederation (AC) or is it… Read more »

Subtitle: Passing the Torch. Remarkably, despite the enormous pressure to disclose the goings on of the federal convention, its delegates managed to keep very close to their oaths of secrecy. In a… Read more »

Subtitle: The New Jersey Plan. In this post, we’ll see why continuance under the Articles of Confederation (AC) was certain to destroy the Union. The commissions for delegates to the convention… Read more »

Subtitle: The Road to Philadelphia. Most narratives on the events leading to the federal convention in Philadelphia begin with the Mount Vernon meeting of 1785, in which delegates from Virginia… Read more »

As Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, George Washington knew like no other man of the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation (AC). From the despair at Valley Forge in 1777-78,… Read more »

Without a formal league until just a few months before the climactic battle of Yorktown in October 1781, the fledgling independent republics of the Revolutionary War somehow managed to frustrate… Read more »

Subtitle: The Question of Sovereignty Didn’t the Framers violate the Articles of Confederation (AC) when they drafted the Constitution? Weren’t the AC the supreme law of the land? This is the… Read more »